Exultant (23 page)

“Perhaps she could,” Maruc said mildly. “That is her specialism.”

“Really? Well, well.” Nilis was playing the visiting dignitary, trying to put Maruc at ease, though without much success, Pirius thought.

They walked on. And behind them the strange young man with the data desks still trailed, unremarked.

Maruc opened a door and led them into a room. “A typical study area,” she said.

Brightly lit by light globes, the room contained desks and cubicles where people and bots, crammed in close together, worked side by side. Most of the scholars worked through flickering Virtual images, but some labored over data desks. The people were small, neat, their heads shaven like Maruc’s. Men and women alike were slim, and it was hard to distinguish between the sexes.

Some of those bare heads looked oddly large to Pirius, their skulls swollen and fragile. It was probably a trick of the light.

The visitors seemed to disturb these scholars. Some of them looked up, nervously, before cowering into their work, as if trying to hide. Others touched each other, clasping hands, rubbing foreheads, or even kissing softly. Not a word was spoken. Pirius could feel the tension in the room until he and the others receded again.

They walked on.

Maruc spoke of how the Archive had been digging its way into Mons Olympus for millennia. In many ways it was an ideal site for a library. Mars was a still, stable world, geologically speaking, and even this, its greatest mountain, had been dead for a billion years. The bulk of Olympus was basaltic rock, and under a surface layer smashed and broken by ancient impacts—in Maruc’s peculiar phrase,
impact gardened—
the rock was porous and friable, quite easy to tunnel into. It grew warmer the deeper you dug, Maruc said, but that wasn’t a problem; some of the deepest chambers even used Mars’s remnant inner heat as an energy supply. The tremendous shield of rock above was of course a protection from any deliberate aggression, as well as from natural disasters up to a small asteroid strike.

Pirius built up a picture of a great warren burrowed through the vast mound of Olympus, people everywhere, running along corridors and laboring in chambers. After twenty thousand years the Archive must run far, he thought, tens of kilometers, even hundreds: under Sol system’s greatest mountain, there was always more room.

Maruc stopped at a doorway and opened it to reach another corridor, identical to the first. They walked down this until after a time they turned through another door into yet another passageway, and then they turned again. Pirius kept trying to build up a map in his head, based on the turns they made, the numbers of doors they passed. But all the corridors were identical, and looked the same in either direction, and he began to be unsure which way he was facing.

Besides, the air was thick, increasingly clammy and warm, and despite his face mask he thought he could smell an odd scent—a milkiness, oddly animal. Disconcerted, disoriented, he began to worry that he was getting lost.

But no matter where they went, the little man with the data desks followed them.

They came to another room, full of more scared-looking archivists. Maruc said that some of these had been assigned to assist Nilis.

Only about half the people living here under the mountain were devoted to the data itself. The rest had administrative functions, like Maruc herself, or they were concerned with support work that kept the facility going: there were specialist groups for digging fresh corridors ever deeper into Olympus, others to maintain the flow of air or water, and others to tend the big nano-food banks, warmed by Olympus’s residual heat.

Data from all across the Galaxy poured into the gigantic holdings here. But after twenty thousand years the new material was a drop in the ocean. These days the bulk of the work was classification—there were whole hierarchies of indices here, Maruc said—and maintenance. There was a constant danger of physical degradation—one function of the rock of Olympus was to shield electronically stored data from damage by cosmic rays—and data items were continually transcribed from one medium to another. With each transcription, elaborate checks were made from multiple comparison copies to ensure no errors were introduced.

She said, “You can see we would have plenty of work to keep us busy even if not a single new item of data ever came in. Because our main task is to fight entropy itself. The Archive is here for the long term.”

“Marvelous, marvelous,” Nilis said.

The community was the result of generations of specialism, she said: you were born to be a librarian, you grew up in cadres of librarians, your seed would go on to produce more librarians, for millennia after millennia. Maruc stood straight, and her eyes shone within their nests of wrinkles. “We, the community of the Archive, have devoted generations past to this project, and we dedicate future generations too. We are proud of what we do. We believe our project is in the best traditions of the Druz Doctrines.”

“Oh, my eyes, no doubt about that,” said Nilis. He still looked thrilled to be here, Pirius thought, like a glutton let loose in a food store. “But let me set you a test. . . .” He outlined his requirements quickly.

Maruc raised a hand, and within seconds a runner was at her side. This one was a boy, surely younger than Pirius. His long, thin legs and short body made him look ungainly, as if he might topple over. But after sprinting up he wasn’t even breathing heavily. Maruc told him what she wanted, and he immediately ran off.

Within five minutes, a different runner came to them, accompanying a floating bot. The bot carried a small, battered-looking data desk, just a slab of some shiny black material held invisibly in place, perhaps by an inertial field.

Nilis stood over it, his mouth a round
O
. “My eyes, my eyes,” he said.

Maruc smiled. “I’m afraid we can’t let you handle it. Any valid spoken command will be accepted, however.”

The floating data desk was so old that its interface protocols were quite alien. But soon Nilis was speaking to the desk, and his words were translated into a strange, distorted version of standard.

Finally a voice spoke from the desk, a stored recording, a clipped, rather stiff voice speaking the same peculiar dialect.

Nilis’s eyes widened further. He said to Pirius, “Do you know what this is? Do you know
who
this is speaking?”

“No.”

“Hama Druz himself used this very desk, on his return journey from the moon Callisto, where he had gone to hunt jasofts. He used this desk to compose his Doctrines, the very words which have governed our lives ever since. And that voice, cautiously reading out an uncompleted draft—that voice belongs to Hama Druz himself! Listen, listen . . .”

At last, Pirius heard that clipped and overprecise voice say words so familiar that even the antique dialect could not mask them:
“A brief life burns brightly.”

Nilis said, “Madam, thank you. I can’t tell you—all of mankind’s true treasures are here, and you are worthy custodians.”

Maruc observed Nilis’s ecstatic reaction with quiet pride.

His face set, Nilis straightened his battered robe. “But enough indulgence. I have work to do. Madam, if you’ll assist me—Pirius?”

“I’ll be fine,” Pirius said. “I’ll explore a little more.”

Maruc said, “I’ll assign somebody to guide you.”

“Thank you. I’ll wait.”

Eagerly Nilis turned away. Pirius watched Maruc lead him down the corridor.

The second they were out of sight, Pirius turned, strode up to the little man who had shadowed them all day, grabbed him by the front of his tunic, and lifted him up until his head rammed against the low ceiling.

“Tell me who you are, and what you want.”

The little man was sweating, trembling, but he forced a grin. He gasped, “Gladly. If you’ll just, you’ll just . . .”

Reluctantly Pirius released him. The man dropped to the worn floor of the corridor. He had dropped his data desks; he scrabbled to pick them up. But still he grinned, calculating.

Pirius snapped, “Well?”

“My name is Tek,” he said. “I’m a Retrieval Specialist.”

Pirius thought that over. “A filing clerk.”

“If you want. But we’re all specialists here. The lovely Maruc is an Interface Specialist—she interfaces between us and the rest of humanity. Then there are the runners with their long legs, the archivists and indexers with their bubble brains—don’t tell me you didn’t notice that! Wait until you see the mechanic types who crawl up the big air ducts.” Still clutching his desks, he let one arm trail on the floor and loped about comically.

Pirius had to suppress a laugh.

“All specialists, you see, all of us. But we fit together like the parts of a smoothly running machine.”

“I’ve never met anybody like you, Tek.”

“Nor I you. But then that’s the point—isn’t it, sir?”

“What is?” Pirius stepped forward and loomed over the little man, until he stopped his capering and stood still.

“Do you think there is
divergence
here? From the human norm. This place is at the heart of the Coalition,
but is it Doctrinal
?”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing, nothing. Not if you don’t
see
it. But look at Maruc, for instance.”

“Maruc?”

“Poor thing. Growing old fast, don’t you think? She’s only a year older than me, just one year. But she looks a decade older. But you see, she
can’t
last long. That’s the trouble with being her kind of specialist, an interfacer. You have to know a lot—you have to know
too
much. And so you have to die, and take your poisonous knowledge with you.” His grin widened, nervously.

Pirius understood little of this. “Maybe
you
know too much,” he said menacingly.

Tek laughed, but Pirius thought he had struck a nerve.

“What do you want, Tek? Why did you follow us?”

“I only want to help you. Whatever you want in here, maybe I can help you find it.” Tek actually winked. “And in return you can help me.”

Pirius bunched his fists. “I could kill you in a second.”

“I daresay you could, I daresay. But this is Sol system, sir, not the Front. And here you need different skills.
Subtler
skills.” Tek hugged his desks to his chest and backed away. “Here comes your escort.”

Pirius glanced over his shoulder to see another worker approaching.

Tek said, “If you need me—”

“I won’t.”

“—ask a runner. Just ask. And in the meantime, be nice to Maruc, even though she’s only a drone.”

A drone.
That word made Pirius shiver. “Why should I?”

“Because she’s my sister.” Tek laughed again. “But then, who isn’t?” Suddenly he stepped close to Pirius and grabbed his arm. Pirius flinched; Tek’s skin was pale, pocked, and his breath was sour. “Tread carefully, Ensign.”

Pirius pulled his arm away.

Breaking into a run, Tek turned a corner and was gone.

Pirius instructed the runner to find him a private room. There he slept until Nilis called for him.

Nilis seemed unhappy. His air of enthusiasm was gone, and his energy had turned into an anxious anger that showed in the fretful set of his face, the way his big hands plucked at his frayed robe. Interface Specialist Maruc trailed behind him, looking uncertain.

“Commissary? What’s wrong?”

Nilis was distracted, as if he barely saw Pirius. “What a place. What a place!” He mopped sweat from his neck. “You know, in their obsessive toiling, here in this huge subterranean mound of data, the Archivists never throw anything away. And their search engines are remarkably effective. There is so much here, Ensign. So many secrets—so much treasure! And all of it buried under the coffin lid of Hama Druz. . . .”

“We came here looking for weapons.”

“Weapons?” he said vaguely. “Ah—yes, of course. Weapons. The Prime Radiant—you needn’t look at me like that, Ensign; I haven’t forgotten our mission!”

“So did you find anything?”

“As a matter of fact, I think I did. Ensign, in your base at the Core, did they teach you about
gravastars
?”

They hadn’t, but this was what Nilis had turned up in his first hasty search for techniques to counter FTL foreknowledge. And as it turned out, Nilis started to explain, Pirius was going to have to make yet another journey into strangeness, here in Sol system, to track down what Nilis thought he had discovered.

But Nilis stopped and stared at Pirius’s arm. “Ensign, what’s that on your sleeve?”

Pirius glanced down. A lozenge shape, glittering brightly, rested on his uniform sleeve; it was no larger than his thumbnail. And it was just where Tek had touched him. Without thinking he clapped his hand over the chip. “Nothing, sir. Uh, an insect.”

Nilis raised bushy eyebrows. “An insect? In here? It’s possible, I suppose—who’s to say? I think our business is done for today. Tomorrow we will return and start digging properly into this business of the gravastars.”

As they were led out of the Archive and back to the golden-brown surface of Mars, Pirius glanced again at the chip. He wasn’t disturbed by it so much as by his own reaction. Why had he concealed it from Nilis?

He felt deeply troubled. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good soldier after all.

Chapter
20

They fell down to Factory Rock.

A dropship was small and basic, just a transparent cylinder big enough for two platoons, twenty infantry, crammed in shoulder to shoulder with their bulky rad-shielded skinsuits and equipment. When Pirius Blue looked out through the ship’s curving hull, he could see the fleshy bulk of the Spline warship that had brought them here from Quin. His own ship was one of thousands committed to this action. From a dozen orifices in the Spline’s hull, the dropships poured out in gleaming streams. And when he looked down he could see how the little ships were falling all across the broad face of the target Rock.

The surface of the Rock was covered by a zigzag lattice of trenches. He was already low enough to see people, tiny figures like toys scurrying clumsily along the trenches or hurling themselves over stretches of open ground. But everywhere points of light sparkled, pink and electric blue, bright on a gray background, and some of those running figures fell, or exploded in soft bursts of crimson. As far as he could see, the whole surface of this asteroid was covered by the crawling figures and the sparkling lights. The fire was reaching up to the sky too; a thread of cherry-red light would connect the ground to one of the falling dropships, and it would burst, spilling bodies into space.